It’s Monday afternoon, and I am back at work since this morning. The weekend was awesome very enjoyable. Los Angeles always always makes me feel good. Don’t know what it is about the city, and everything therein, but it is just a great feeling to be there.

Drove back early in the morning, so I am kinda tired. The traffic was absolutely, surprisingly not bad till about 5 miles before destination. So I think it is a viable thing for me - to go to LA if needed, over the weekend, and drive back on Monday morning.

Reached there Friday night, and had dinner at a nice Mexican place - El Coyote. The waitresses were scary looking, but I think that was by design. They were made to look scary, what with their witchy-dress and all that. The food was so-so. I’ve had better Mexican elsewhere. We were so tired that night, that we just went off to sleep after that. Of course, we saw a little bit of Coupling - a friend has Seasons 1 to 3 on DVD. The show is awesome too good. Very funny, even on the 4th watch.

Saturday morning, we went to the Disney Concert Hall in downtown LA. It is designed by Frank Gehry, whose work is awesome apparently good. The auditorium unfortunately was closed because of an on-going rehearsal. I would say it is a must-see for people visiting LA. Before that though, we stopped by Annapurna for South Indian brunch. It was awesome so filling! And what was interesting was that some of the booths had flat screens, keyboards and mice, for free computer use, including internet! Wow, did not know that South Indian places would double as internet cafes. Good move, Annapurna.

After Disney, we took the traditional USC bookstore trip. Bought some t-shirts and had some coffee in the Trojan grounds. Trojan grounds is the famous coffee shop at USC where I have spent quite a few $$$ during school times. It serves Starbucks coffee and other related stuff. Very nice to see that they are still the same - crowded and cool.

For some reason, this trip to USC did not give me goosebumps that much. I guess most of the times I have visited after graduation, I have been there during vacation time. So the campus has been empty. And that is huge because you get a chance to soak it in. But last weekend, there were many kids walking about and having fun and it seemed ‘crowded’ to me. Weird.

Went to a Formula-1 store from there. The store is in Beverly Hills and has the best collection of racing merchandise I have seen ever. Pretty huge replica collection, and also suits and jackets. All of it was of course very expensive, but the guy at the store was telling me that it is all an investment because these become collectible in some time because these things are not mass-produced. They stop production after a period of time. I wanted to get the Kimi hat, but it was $40! Could not convince myself that it was necessary :-(

Came home and relaxed for a bit, and then decided to meet up with some cousins. One goes to ucla (boo!) and the other lives in Riverside. The latter was visiting the former and they had both gone to see the ucla game (vs San Diego State). We met for dinner, at a Malaysian place. Very nice. Tasty food - all around. Filled ourselves to the limit and then decide to get some dessert at a dessert place. But we forgot that it was Saturday night in Old Town Pasadena, so everywhere there was a huge line. So we skipped The Cheescake Factory, 21 Choices and some others, before standing in line at the Ghirardelli store. But before we could order, they gave us some samples of their chocolate. We had one ‘thin’ each and it was yum! It was sooo good that we decided to skip dessert and carry on. We ended up going to the Pasadena Brewing Company - a micro brewery. It was my cousin’s (from Riverside) birthday, so we sang for him, and then, since we were all quite tired - we from all the ‘sight seeing’ in the day time and them from the game, we decided to call it a night. Drop one cousin off in Westwood and came home and slept.

Sunday morning, we had brunch with some good buddies from USC. It was fun to catch up. More about one of them in a later post. From there, we went to see Garden State at The Grove.

Garden State is an AWESOME movie. It is written and directed by Zach Braff, and he is also in the movie as the main character. It is kinda slow, but very well made. I highly recommend the movie. And yea, the soundtrack to it - fabulous. I think it may the first CD I will buy in years!

We wanted to see Shark Tale immediately after that, but we decided against it. Instead, we took a drive up the coast to Malibu beach. It was a nice drive and we had fun in the car, looking at the lucky people who live on the mountains overlooking the Pacific Ocean.

Drove back, relaxed for a few minutes and went to Masala in Cerritos, which is Little India in the LA area. Masala is known for its desi Chinese food, and we pigggggged out there. All the stuff there was excellent. Taste-wise as well as quality-wise. To top it off, we had the Mango Souffle there, and we were not disappointed. It was beautiful.

Then, came back home and picked up the bags from my cousin’s house, where we were parked for the weekend, and went to a friend’s house to stay with her. She just moved from SF to LA and we know here from the time we moved to SF (I know here from slightly before that). Spent the night there and woke up early morning (5am) and started driving at about 6.15am. Reached here in 2 hours, checked in and here I am.

It is only Monday afternoon yet :-(